Several leaders from Synchrony Systems attended CloudExpo / DXWorldExpo New York on November 12-13, 2018. The two days were packed with 20+ keynotes, 200+ breakout sessions, and 150+ exhibitors sharing the latest in the world of Cloud Computing, DevOps, FinTech, Digital Transformation, and more.

A stat we found sobering but not surprising is that 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. While there are many factors that can contribute to the fall of a company, we believe an important one is an inability to evolve the business. Companies can be held back by dated business models, irrelevant products or services, and/or aging technology. The world is changing at rates never seen before; to survive, companies must continuously adapt.

While we walked away with many new insights, we would like to share three highlights from sessions at DXWorld that resonated with us.

1) "Digital Transformation" has become an umbrella buzzword, but real challenges are beneath the hype.

The term "digital transformation" (DX) is being used by everyone for just about any company initiative that involves technology, the web, ecommerce, software, or even customer experience. While the term has certainly turned into a buzzword with a lot of hype, the transition to a more connected, digital world is real and comes with real challenges.

In his opening keynote, Four Essentials To Become DX Hero Status Now, Jonathan Hoppe, Co-Founder and CTO of Total Uptime Technologies, shared that beyond the hype, digital transformation initiatives are infusing IT budgets with critical investment for technology. This is shifting the IT organization from a cost center/center of efficiency to one that is strategic for revenue growth. CIOs are working with the new reality of cloud, mobile-first, and digital initiatives across all areas of their businesses. What's more, top IT talent wants to work on DX initiatives, or will look for opportunities elsewhere.

Besides the business promises of DX and the pressure from IT talent, technical debt is a major challenge for many CIOs. In-house legacy applications built on antiquated programming languages and platforms can hold the business back from being digitally enabled.

Jonathan said the key to success for DX transformation is to start small. Rather than tackle a large transformational initiative with many potential fail points, he suggested picking ones that have less risk and can give the team early wins to build momentum.

We couldn't agree more. We often advise IT leaders to investigate modernization solutions that can migrate the application to the desired platform/language with 100% equivalency, rather than re-writing a business-critical application from scratch. This path saves not only money, but critical time in our new, fast-paced digital world.

2) Cognitive enterprises are on the horizon, and they require a whole new tech architecture.

IBM Fellow, CTO, and cloud expert Shankar Kalyana gave a compelling presentation on The Path to Hybrid Digital Transformation. He talked about the essential attributes to enable business growth and innovation on the cloud, why existing data sources are so critical to success, and how DevOps and Containers can deliver new services based on cognitive, machine learning, and IoT. He believes that the rise in cloud-enabled exponential technologies is teeing up another era of business architecture change.

To realize the cognitive enterprise, which is the enterprise of the future, he said, businesses must embrace the following key characteristics:

AI-infused, cloud-enabled business platforms

Automation, self-healing by design

Experience-centered design

Fit-for-mission skills

Product management philosophy

Agile DevOps, test-driven experimentation culture

Hybrid, multi-cloud operating model and architecture

Multi-speed, multi-modal flexibility

Everything as a service

Glo-Cal reach

Containers as a critical technical strategy

Agile architecture

However, today's reality is that a majority of the data (80%) still lives in the enterprise, not in the cloud. What's more, all CTOs and CIOs deal with legacy systems and technology. The goal is to embrace future technologies while pulling legacy forward, to work together beautifully from an end-consumer/customer experience point. This requires a holistic approach to transformation.

We also see our clients balancing the three objectives shown above: optimizing IT, adding cloud service to existing applications, and building new applications on cloud-native platforms. Our job at Synchrony is to help our clients move in the direction of modern architecture while mitigating risk to business operations.

3) We can learn a lot about business transformation from Amazon

Many different speakers used Amazon as a case study by. Perhaps the most comprehensive session was Digital Transformation and Disruption, Amazon Style - What You Can Learn by Chris Kocher, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Grey Heron venture consulting. He offered interesting insight into the new markets and industries that Amazon is disrupting, many of which thought they were safe but now are in danger of being "Amazoned."

His session examined how Amazon creates new value with vertical and horizontal integration, Value Creation of new categories, Value Migration into adjacent categories and markets, and why they excel with their Value Delivery System.

He also gave examples of how Amazon "zigs when others zag." They launched a 70-page printed toy catalog for the 2018 holidays, for example, which is reminiscent of the Sears and Toys "R" Us catalogs popular in years past.

He also shared some critical success factors in digital transformation, in the light of the Amazon case study. They are:

Like many attendees, we walked away with lots to think about for our own business, as well as how we can continue to help our clients along their technology modernization journeys. What did you walk away with? Tweet us @SynchronySys.

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

CloudEXPO has been the M&A capital for Cloud companies for more than a decade with memorable acquisition news stories which came out of CloudEXPO expo floor. DevOpsSUMMIT New York faculty member Greg Bledsoe shared his views on IBM's Red Hat acquisition live from NASDAQ floor. Acquisition news was announced during CloudEXPO New York which took place November 12-13, 2019 in New York City.

CloudEXPO is the single event where technology buyers and vendors meet to experience and discus cloud computing and all that it entails. For more than a decade, sponsors and exhibitors of CloudEXPO benefit from unmatched branding, profile building and lead generation opportunities through our following unique tools. For more information on sponsorship, exhibit, and keynote opportunities call us at 954 242-0444 or contact us ▸ Here

Featured on-site presentation and ongoing on-demand webcast exposure to a captive audience of industry decision-makers

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Online advertising on 4,5 million article pages in SYS-CON's leading i-Technology Publications

Capitalize on our Comprehensive Marketing efforts leading up to the show with print mailings, e-newsletters and extensive online media coverage

Financial enterprises in New York City, London, Singapore, and other world financial capitals are embracing a new generation of smart, automated FinTech that eliminates many cumbersome, slow, and expensive intermediate processes from their businesses. Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 23rd CloudEXPO, June 24-26, 2019 at Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA will find fresh new content in full new FinTech & Enterprise Blockchain track.

Cloud-Native thinking and Serverless Computing are now the norm in financial services, manufacturing, telco, healthcare, transportation, energy, media, entertainment, retail and other consumer industries, as well as the public sector.

The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

DevOpsSUMMIT at CloudEXPO expands the DevOps community, enable a wide sharing of knowledge, and educate delegates and technology providers alike.

Now is the time for a truly global DX event, to bring together the leading minds from the technology world in a conversation about Digital Transformation. DX encompasses the continuing technology revolution, and is addressing society's most important issues throughout the entire $78 trillion 21st-century global economy.

DXWorldEXPO® has organized these issues along 10 tracks, 22 keynotes and general sessions, and a faculty of 222 of the world's top speakers.

Global 2000 companies have more than US$40 trillion in annual revenue - more than 50% of the world's entire GDP. The Global 2000 spends a total of US$2.4 trillion annually on enterprise IT. The average Global 2000 company has US$11 billion in annual revenue. The average Global 2000 company spends more than $600 million annually on enterprise IT. Governments throughout the world spend another US$500 billion on IT - much of it dedicated to new Smart City initiatives.

For the past 10 years CloudEXPO® helped drive the migration to modern enterprise IT infrastructures, built upon the foundation of cloud computing. Today's hybrid, multiple cloud IT infrastructures integrate Big Data, analytics, blockchain, the IoT, mobile devices, and the latest in cryptography and enterprise-grade security.

Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. DX is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

About DXWorldEXPO LLC

DXWorldEXPO LLC is a Lighthouse Point, Florida-based trade show company and the creator of DXWorldEXPO - Digital Transformation Conference & Expo. The company produces and presents the world's most influential technology events including CloudEXPO, DevOpsSUMMIT, and FinTechEXPO.

Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, discussed why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rather than mimicking legacy server virtualization workflows and architectures.

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, discussed why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rather than mimicking legacy server virtualization workflows and architectures.

xMatters helps enterprises prevent, manage and resolve IT incidents. xMatters industry-leading Service Availability platform prevents IT issues from becoming big business problems. Large enterprises, small workgroups, and innovative DevOps teams rely on its proactive issue resolution service to maintain operational visibility and control in today's highly-fragmented IT environment. xMatters provides toolchain integrations to hundreds of IT management, security and DevOps tools. xMatters is the primary Service Availability platform trusted by leading global companies and innovative challengers...

At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, discussed why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rather than mimicking legacy server virtualization workflows and architectures.

Take advantage of autoscaling, and high availability for Kubernetes with no worry about infrastructure. Be the Rockstar and avoid all the hurdles of deploying Kubernetes. So Why not take Heat and automate the setup of your Kubernetes cluster? Why not give project owners a Heat Stack to deploy Kubernetes whenever they want to?
Hoping to share how anyone can use Heat to deploy Kubernetes on OpenStack and customize to their liking.
This is a tried and true method that I've used on my OpenStack clusters and I will share the benefits, bumps along the way and the lessons learned.

This week I had the pleasure of delivering the opening keynote at Cloud Expo New York. It was amazing to be back in the great city of New York with thousands of cloud enthusiasts eager to learn about the next step on their journey to embracing a cloud-first worldl."

@SteveMar_Msft

“

How does Cloud Expo do it every year? Another INCREDIBLE show - our heads are spinning - so fun and informative."

@SOASoftwareInc

“

Thank you @ThingsExpo for such a great event. All of the people we met over the past three days makes us confident IoT has a bright future."

@Cnnct2me

“

One of the best conferences we have attended in a while. Great job, Cloud Expo team! Keep it going."

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